When his father Edsel, who by then was running FoMoCo, died in 1943 and Henry Ford reasserted control of the company, the United States government discharged Henry Ford II from the Navy. Ford Motor Company was a critical military supplier and the government could not afford for it to be run by an always crazy and now senile man. The junior Ford brought in the so-called “whiz kids” who turned what had been Henry’s feudal fiefdom into a modern corporation, along the way helping to introduce modern postwar cars in the ’49 Ford.

Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel (in hat and beard), with his Lincoln Cosmopolitan Presidential Limousine, just like Harry Truman’s, a gift from Henry Ford II